Tag Archives: cars

London-based artist Gerry Judah has been widely known for his large-scale outdoor installations. Especially noteworthy are his works commissioned for such famous car brands as Jaguar, Porsche, Mercedes-Benz and others. Collaborating with the sponsors, Judah has created a series of gravity-defying suspended installations featuring scale-sized model cars shooting as high as 35 meters in the sky.

Gerry Judah has been building his car-themed sculptures since 1997. His tremendous structures have always been a sight at the annual Goodwood Festival of Speed in Sussex, England. Judah works extensively with steel. Naturally the amount of it consumed for each installation can go as high as whopping 175 tonnes (Jaguar, 2011). Despite the rugged material, Judah’s structures seem to be incredibly lightweight flexible. His works are particularly appreciated for the cohesion with the style of cars they represent. Here’s Judah talking about the design of Porsche 911 monument (above):

”The 911 is a fantastic shape that can’t be deconstructed or embellished, so in this context, the sculpture had to provide the right platform for the car to soar up and shine in the sky. <…> The concept was that each car is shooting into the sky, supporting one another, racing each other, captured in a perfect moment. Like the cars it displays, the sculpture is superbly engineered, lightweight and reflective of the Porsche 911 itself: simple, pure and built for the job.”

His latest work for Mercedes-Benz (below) features a 160-tonne steel sculpture with two Mercedes-Benz cars passing each other in midair. The installation is 90 meters long and soars 26 meters into the sky. It celebrates the 120-years-anniversary of motorsport heritage by Mercedes-Benz.

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For a while now, Gerry Judah has produced extremely large-scale outdoor installations. And he’s become pretty good at it. Especially notable are his automobile-themed works, which suspend scale-sized model cars high in the air as part of whirling, vertigo-inducing sculpture work. Kinda like Steve Tobin’s work, except with horsepower. (via)

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You don’t want to eat that, trust me. Each of these sculptural creations is made up of equal parts reclaimed wood, time, and toil. These handcrafted wall mounted bas reliefs are the speciality of Ron van der Ende, an artist based out of Rotterdam, The Netherlands. So barring a peculiar taste for splinters, don’t chomp on that meaty morsel. Do, however, take a closer look at these works after the jump.

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Here are some scans from the short lived Hot Rotor Magazine, which as far as I can tell was a promotional item issued by the turbine/rocket engine company Turbonique. The images, helpfully scanned by Jason Torchinsky, convey a playful sense of futurist optimism which was all too common in 1960s America, yet we can still clearly see that Turbonique’s vision of the future is very much steeped in 1960s industrial design and culture.

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I know what you’re all thinking. Enough with this serious art stuff, right? It IS summer after all. Well here’s something exciting for all of you: the Netherlands division of Toyota recently commissioned a couple lucky typographers, Pierre Smeets & Damien Aresta of Please Let Me Design, to create a typeface made entirely from the movements of a car. The car, driven by professional driver Stef van Campenhoudt was equipped with large colored dots on the roof, which were then tracked with a camera and some software custom written by media artist Zach Lieberman. The result, entitled iQ font, is up for download here.

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Man (possibly someone in character) traveling northwest at 60 mph on U.S. Route 101 in the vicinity of Hollywood on a late Sunday afternoon in March 1991

As you may recall from reading the blog over the past week, Saturday was the Funk Rumble block party in Downtown LA (Chinatown, to be precise) at which Beautiful/Decay was a vendor. Now this information is pretty much incidental, except to say that I live a fair distance from Chinatown, so the drive back from Funk Rumble was a lengthy one, especially due to the amount of traffic at the time we were traveling. Happily though, I wasn’t driving as I usually am (thank you, fellow intern Corinna), so I got to engage in my favorite freeway traffic activity – looking at all the other people sitting in traffic next to me.

The allure of this mode of observation isn’t lost on St. Louis-born photographer Andrew Bush. In his series 66 Drives, Bush captured candid portraits of drivers, mostly around LA. One thing I find particularly interesting about these photographs is that you can begin to see resemblances between cars and their drivers, not unlike the fabled idea of dogs resembling their owners. You can see how much the car is an extension of a driver’s personality.

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Pae White often uses graphics and decals in her works and she has produced a series of graphic treatments, unique to each vehicle, entitled ‘Rover Momentum’, using an interpretation of the dusks and dawns of the countries represented at the Fair. Her designs create a striking and dynamic ‘vehicle’ for the Fair as the vehicles move across London during the days of the exhibition.